Status Report: Docker Toolbox failures on Windows 10

TL;DR

A growing body of experience building containers on Windows 10 systems (using the Docker Toolbox for Windows) indicates that Docker Toolbox for Windows (on Win10 at minimum) is not a supportable combination for our project at present. It appears that the command in docker-compose.yml cannot be found – at least in cases where the called script is stored in a directory inside the container.

While there may be some adjustment that could be made to support both Windows and *NIX hosts in this scenario, it’s yet another incompatibility we’ve encountered (among many) that only crops up when using Windows as the host, and our team has to focus its cycles on supporting the majority of our project’s developers (who aren’t on Windows).

Problem

One of my colleagues on the project reported the following error when bringing up the Docker container from this branch in this repo. He’s using Windows 10, Docker Toolbox for Windows:

I explained that as far as I understand Docker engine and Docker Toolbox (which hosts the engine in a Virtualbox VM), what’s going on is that inside the container, Docker is trying to execute /code/docker-entrypoint.sh – so theoretically there should be no reason why this would behave any differently on Windows than Mac or Linux, since the runtime environment inside the Docker container shouldn’t know anything about its underlying host’s environment. I know for sure it’s working well on Mac and Linux, even on my personal Mac that’s running the Docker Toolbox.

Investigation

Budget repo on Windows: fails

I attempted this myself with the same branch/repo using Docker Toolbox for Windows (downloaded today, running v1.13.1 of Docker engine) on Windows 10 (Anniversary update), and received effectively the same result:

...
Step 12/12 : WORKDIR /code
---> 37cb2ce39964
Removing intermediate container af6440be2e49
Successfully built 37cb2ce39964
WARNING: Image for service web was built because it did not already exist. To rebuild this image you must use `docker-compose build` or `docker-compose up --build`.
Creating budgetproj_web_1
Attaching to budgetproj_web_1
web_1 | standard_init_linux.go:178: exec user process caused "no such file or directory"
budgetproj_web_1 exited with code 1

Budget repo on Mac: succeeds

The same commit from the same branch/repo on OS X 10.11 with Docker Toolbox for Mac:

(Note: the runtime error in “manage.py” indicates that the command in docker-compose.yml was executed correctly, and there’s an app-specific issue in running one of the commands inside the docker-entrypoint.sh script that docker-compose.yml specifies.)